The Children(98)

Guin shifted beneath a discomforting recognition. All those near misses, city by city. She’d blamed bad luck, and Candy’s interference.

“Sometimes he’d go into his studio, to work or whatever, and when he came back, he smelled different. I don’t mean like sweat or paint. I mean—how do you lock yourself inside a room in the hills and come out smelling like you’ve been in a damned pine tree? Or sitting by a fire? I’m not making this up, Guin!”

Guin ran her tongue over her teeth. Their points and planes, her molars ground down into shallow seas. She poked the jagged place where her front tooth chipped years ago, on the edge of the Farmhouse’s kitchen sink. “Fire?”

Arlene touched the black cotton over her sternum. “He’s got this necklace. Big ugly charm on a chain. He kept it under his shirt, and he never took it off. Wouldn’t tell me where he got it, didn’t even want me to touch it. When we had sex, he’d turn it around so it hung down his back.” Her gaze juddered as she focused hard on Guin. She was drunk, too. “It was gold, I think. Kinda looked like an ammonite. You know the one I’m talking about?”

Guin didn’t answer. Nobody could make her answer.

“No?” Arlene murmured. “Well. Then I’ll tell you what I think.”

Her graceful hands trembled, and the wine-bitten bow of her mouth. Her pupils were twin blackouts. “I think the Ninth City is real, and I think he visits it. Maybe you do, too. That voice I heard, that sounded like your mom—I think that voice was the Architect.”

Guin’s shoulders dropped. What a gift that would be. A place that could drain you of every memory, until you were as light and blameless as an eggshell. It wouldn’t be the worst thing, to be a Hollow.

“No,” she said dully. “There is no Ninth City.”

She could’ve left it at that. Instead, she leaned in until her mouth was right up against Arlene’s ear and whispered a stark, unmagical truth. “But there was an Architect.”

A wary light broke over Arlene’s face. “I always wondered,” she whispered back, “why he never ever talked about her.”

“Whoa, sorry. I didn’t mean to interrupt.”

A girl stood in the doorway holding two saucers of cake, jealousy turning her features feline. And their bodies were close enough that this might have been a clinch, or the start of one. Guin stepped back.

The girl gave a tiger’s smile. “Cake?”



* * *




Guin stayed. Because her apartment was empty of character or company, while this place was warmly lit and full of strangers.

She drank and danced and ate cake with edible flowers. The night smoothed and blurred. At some point they clattered up endless tunnels of piss-yellow stairway and out onto the roof. The ordinary city glittered below them like the Ninth.

There’s the Mortal Cinema, someone said. There’s the Explorers’ Bookstore. And there’s your own heart’s key, swinging from the Architect’s tree. You will spend the rest of your life seeking the lock that fits it.

Maybe it was Guin who was speaking. Her mouth felt bruised and her throat ached, and she said, “Thanks, Ennis,” when someone held out a lighter. She was in a fairy clearing. Or a darkened room, lit by globes of candlelight.

“Lie down,” someone said, divesting her of shoes and cigarette. “You can totally stay. And, hey, can I tell you my favorite part?”

“Of course you can,” she murmured. It was her job, after all, to listen.

“I always loved the wedding scene, on the deck of the Salt Witch. Remember?”

Guin nodded. Book two, The Salt Witch and the Wildwood Heart.

“It’s dangerous,” the speaker went on, “to marry at sea. But the captain is a wanted man, he’ll be arrested if he sets foot on land. So he asks for the Moon’s protection. Then the clouds cover her, and the mermaids come up from the sea. I always saw it like—their heads as seals’ heads, shiny and black. And the bride. When she sacrifices herself, I pictured her doing it in one of those old-fashioned diving helmets. I didn’t want her to drown.”

This scene really was in the book. The image lived in Guin, too: a woman suspended in a plane of bubbling sea, face obscured and white dress swirling.

“I remember that part,” she whispered. “I loved it, too.”

“You know what?” the person went on. “I used to wish I were you. When I was a little girl. Now I just feel sorry for you.”

“Do you know what?” Guin replied without opening her eyes. Speaking to Arlene, though she wouldn’t be sure in the morning whether it was Arlene who’d been sitting there. “You’re nothing but a showman. A mediocrity. You have no real talent. You know how I know?” She rolled onto her side, and for a moment the world kept rolling without her. “If you had any actual talent, Ennis would’ve taken it. And then I would feel sorry for you.”

A pause. Then a laugh, uncomfortable. “Okay, babe. Sleep it off.”

The snowy feeling of a blanket being thrown over her body, cool then slowly warming. Guin curled in tightly beneath it, like an ammonite. She said something else, but nobody heard it.





Fifty-Two

2004




“Oh, Jesus fuck.”